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7/05/2011 @ 3:09PM458,242 views

Ten Years After Decriminalization, Drug Abuse Down by Half in Portugal

Drug warriors often contend that drug use would skyrocket if we were to legalize or decriminalize drugs in the United States. Fortunately, we have a real-world example of the actual effects of ending the violent, expensive War on Drugs and replacing it with a system of treatment for problem users and addicts.

Health experts in Portugal said Friday that Portugal’s decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked.

“There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.

The number of addicts considered “problematic” — those who repeatedly use “hard” drugs and intravenous users — had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said.

Other factors had also played their part however, Goulao, a medical doctor added.

“This development can not only be attributed to decriminalisation but to a confluence of treatment and risk reduction policies.”

Many of these innovative treatment procedures would not have emerged if addicts had continued to be arrested and locked up rather than treated by medical experts and psychologists. Currently 40,000 people in Portugal are being treated for drug abuse. This is a far cheaper, far more humane way to tackle the problem. Rather than locking up 100,000 criminals, the Portuguese are working to cure 40,000 patients and fine-tuning a whole new canon of drug treatment knowledge at the same time.

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There are a lot of problems I have with this. First off, the report that we have from the huge Portuguese bureaucracy simply argues for it’s own existence. They report things like HIV from shared needles being down, and things like that, but that is because there are big government entitlements of needles, clinics, and medical services that have been provided there to deal with the increased additions. According to one report rather than being cut in half Lifetime use has nearly doubled! “Lifetime use of illicit drugs increased from 7.8% to 12%, lifetime use of cannabis increased from 7.6% to 11.7%, cocaine from 0.9% to 1.9%, ecstasy from 0.7% to 1.3%, and heroin from 0.7% to 1.1%”

So all of the people saying that the war on drugs failed, and who talk about all of the money wasted. You haven’t seen anything yet till you implement the huge socialist medical system around the drug use/abuse culture. Also, at the same time, violent crime in Portugal has increased sharply!

The Liberty guaranteed in our constitution is the liberty of conscience, not liberality of action. A lot of you so called libertarians think that the liberty guaranteed is a liberality of action.

Thanks for that information. Worth noting is that the Portuguese health officials didn’t exactly LIE about their results – nowhere did they say that USE had gone down, just what they consider to be PROBLEM use (and, of course, they had just redefined that term). One should always be cautious of ‘reports’ such as these, which, as you said, often exist to justify the budgets of the agency/officials that issue them. I’m just amazed at how some people seem to be able to read into these articles things that were never there in attempts to support their own position on an issue.

As a young person I have watched as the dogma and propaganda about drugs used in my health class both be a lie and a danger. It overhypes and lies and casts far too much misinformation into drugs, this not only makes the allure of them much greater but also endangers kids. As an “adult” in the legal sense I have reached my own conclusions of which drugs I can take. Thankfully, even though I am in the U.S my parents have helped my social drinking habits, I enjoy the occasional beer but don’t like to get drunk more than once a month and hate getting “wasted”.

Even more so with weed, because I am runner I am opposed to any smoke entering my lungs but I can still enjoy weed occasionally. I also have done some psychedelics and have emerged as a better person and view them as something to not take lightly and very sparingly (maybe once or twice a year).

What I am getting at is your article helps illustrate my point that for every “heavy addict” there are ten safe and responsible users. And instead of locking these addicts up we should be helping them and treating drugs like a health issue. Also we shouldn’t be wasting our resources on policing otherwise law-abiding citizens. Thankfully I have had no run in with the law but it hurts me to think that I could get a very large fine or even jail time (or denied a job) because I wanted to relax one particular weekend.

The war on drugs in the U.S. costs us billions of dollars. We need that money now more than ever. Thanks for posting this. It’s something that needs to be addressed consistently until something is done about it.